Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “When do you return to your own country?” I asked Ross in English.

  “What manner of creature are you?” he replied, when I provisionally unstopped his mouth. “Why this attack?”

  “Because only you among all those gathered here speaks the language in which I now address you,” I said.

  “Then for the first time I curse my birthplace,” Ross whispered. “Pray, let me go.”

  “When do you next plan to visit your homeland?”

  “In the fall,” Ross said. “As soon after the Tamyr Princess has put in at Murmansk as I may book passage.”

  “Passage to where?” I asked.

  “I have family in Kirkcaldy upon whom I have not laid eyes in five years,” he said. “I pray that I am not to be denied a chance to see them again, ever.”

  “I wish you no harm, Angus Ross of Kirkcaldy. Rather, I desire from you a not unreasonable boon.”

  “I am at your service.” At this confession, I smiled, perhaps for the first time since my rebirth; the Scot drew away from my smile as if from an unsheathed dagger. “Pray, sir, tell me what you would have me do.”

  “First, Mr Ross, what I ask, I ask for another’s sake. Also, I have waylaid you as I have because I well know the hateful, even violent response that my unforeseen appearance among your kind everywhere excites.”

  Through gritted teeth Ross said, “That I understand.”

  I released him. He made no move to bolt, and I put a finger to my lips. “Know,” I whispered, “that once you leave here, sworn to secrecy about both your charge and its author, I have no power to guarantee your faithfulness to it. Should you abandon the task, you need fear neither my following curse nor the eternal prospect of retribution. What I ask, I trust you to do from a sense of honour.”

  “A mighty trust,” said Ross, whether to commend or belittle it I could not tell. He deposited his figurines in a bag of waterproof fishskin. I, in turn, took from my pocket the letters that I wanted Ross to deliver to Mrs Saville. I outlined for him his charge and gave him the packet. Although I could hardly enforce his compliance, I asked that he refrain from trumpeting any word of our talk or even of his unexpected meeting with me here in Janalach.

  “But who are you?” Ross asked. “Aye, what are you?”

  “Because you have agreed to carry these letters, I give you leave to read them,” I said. “They explain, not always fairly or compassionately, what I do not choose to reiterate on this dreary shore. Fare thee well, Mr Ross. I thank you in advance for the brave accomplishment of your errand.” With that, I leapt away into a nearby crevice and scaled its chimney, for atop the cliff I had hidden my sire in a fortress of glacial debris.

  Ross, I observed, stood rooted to the spot where I had accosted him. Had he imagined my unlikely manifestation? At length the packet in his hands persuaded him otherwise, and he ambled bemusedly back into the company of men.

  As I learned years later, Ross fulfilled his humanitarian charge. The letters entrusted to him-nay, my copies of those letters-he delivered to Mrs Saville, a neighbour of the Godwins in Holburn, on his trip home to Kirkcaldy. Later, in a quest for solace, Mrs Saville passed them along to a member of that family, either to peruse and destroy or to bring out under the imprimatur of M. J. Godwin & Co.

  Ross had told Wilton ’s sister that he had received the copied letters from a giant much resembling the creature delineated therein. Mrs Saville, knowing the handwriting for a good but imperfect forgery of her brother’s, rejected the Scotsman’s tale and his letters as a cruel hoax. She had long ago deduced, and resigned herself to the fact, of Captain Walton’s death. For his part, William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and the novel Caleb Williams, could not steel himself either to destroy or to publish the peculiar manuscript passed along to him by his second wife, the erstwhile Mary Jane Clairmont.

  Almost by default, the letters fell into the keeping of the adolescent Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a young woman of enormous wit, independence, and energy. She regarded Walton’s letters as a cabalistic document of Promethean consequence. Even before her “elopement” to the Continent with the married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the summer of 1814, she had struggled to shape a readable story from these materials. Almost four years later, having reworked and abridged my copies of the letters, Mary allowed them, with more revisions by her husband, to appear anonymously in three small volumes from the little-regarded publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.

  Some literary historians have contended that this “novel” burst upon the world without an acknowledged author because Mrs Shelley feared either that reviewers would never believe a woman her age the originator of such a brutal and abhorrent tale or that her notoriety as a wanton and unorthodox, even anarchic, female would poison its reception and sales. I offer a simpler reason for the absence of the author’s name from the title page: Mrs Shelley, though she introduced certain clarifying changes into the manuscript, neither conceived the story nor wrote it. The text of Frankenstein indisputably reveals its author to be the late Robert Walton. On the other hand, because that text consists largely of my creator’s partisan recitation of his own biography, even Walton deserves little credit beyond that due any conscientious scribe or amanuensis. In a sense, the book’s title simultaneously reveals its author. Why, then, would a person of Mrs Shelley’s talent and probity wish to recommend herself as the fountainhead of this monstrous story?

  Initially, of course, she did not. Later, however, when the book created a nationwide stir, prompting a writer in Blackwood’s to put forward his sincere wishes for the putative author’s “future happiness,” thereby forgiving Mrs Shelley her unconventional past, it became harder to insist upon her role as an editor and ever more tempting to embrace the work as wholly the product of her own philosophical musings and storytelling proclivities. In 1831, this temptation led her to elaborate upon her husband’s mood-setting fiction of the ghost-story-writing competition at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Further, she irrevocably acknowledged authorship of Frankenstein by allowing the publishers of the revised edition of 1832 to feature prominently on its title page her name. Perhaps the fact that in the fourteen years between the two editions she had published three novels of her own, along with many accomplished incidental writings, effectively obscured for her the actual genesis of the work. Mrs Shelley suffered much in her heroic life, from the high-minded betrayals of her most cherished loved ones as well as from the untimely deaths of her husband and all but one of her children. Thus, I do not anathematise her for claiming unassisted creatorship of the one title-The Last Man, fine as it is, does not qualify-that enrolled her among the immortals.

  Quitting Janalach, I blessedly had no foreknowledge of the events that would carry my distorted biography to the world. I wished only to atone for the crimes of my past life and to discover in my second incarnation a place of at least marginal acceptance. The necessity to hide, to make certain salubrious changes in myself as well as discreet contacts among the tribespeople of the ice coasts and the taiga, required discipline and fortitude. I hiked east, sustaining myself on lichens, bog moss, and the leaves and spring fruit of several different kinds of stunted shrubs. I made skis of larchwood and built myself a movable blind of mammoth bones and evergreen foliage. The blind enabled me to skirt the encampments of nomads, and the fluid edges of reindeer herds, without betraying to either man or beast my presence in or near their environs.

  After several months’ travel and the overmastering of many hardships, however, two Chukchi hunters caught me traversing a barren expanse of tundra and let fly at me from their compound bows a barrage of arrows. That I dragged a travois and attired myself as a human being enraged rather than conciliated them. I had trespassed their demense, and my size convicted me as a likely scourge of their hunting grounds.

  Two arrows struck home, their walrus-ivory points embedding themselves in my flesh, one above my hip and the other in my calf. I roared b
itterly. I menaced the bowmen with broad semaphoring gestures. Uncowed, they muttered unintelligibly, perhaps disappointedly, before retreating out of sight beyond a fluted sastruga.

  Thus abandoned, I sought to minister to my wounds. I snapped off the arrow shafts and removed my leggings to expose the embedded points. In this half-naked state, I would have presented a prodigiously vulnerable target, had my Chukchi tormentors returned with reinforcements. I made haste, then, to dislodge the ivory barbs with the tip of a skinning knife. The pain was slight, but a copious oozing of pale blood accompanied this surgery. With spruce resin and rags I dressed my wounds. Then, lame and sore, I drew on my leggings and retreated several miles to an orphaned copse of cedars. Therein I erected a hut of branches and sailcloth in which to mull my outcast state and to recoup my vigour.

  This recoupment, although at the time I hardly knew it, protracted into a hibernation akin to my death sleep in the ice cavern far to the west. A blizzard stormed and departed. The twilit autumn turned to night. I may have had some imperfect consciousness of time’s passage, but in my womblike shelter, the lashing of the sleet, the lamentations of the wind, and the brink starlight strewn above the grove chimed in me as inward rather than outer phenomena. In my stupefaction I reposed much as a salmon, stunned by the cuff of a bear and twitching on a rock, would nonetheless intuit its fate.

  Eventually, I awoke to ice, snow, and uncouth Aeolian music. My wounds had healed. Revitalised, I fought clear of my wintry entombment and journeyed again towards the Utopia of my innocent fancy…

  At dinner, Curriden griped Kizzy’d put baking soda instead of baking powder into her biscuits. (Or vice versa.) They looked like “baby cow flops” and tasted like “carbon-paper ashes.”

  “Mrs Lorrows has had an off day,” Jumbo defended her.

  “Uh-uh,” Kizzy said. “But I sometimes has a tumble day when the likes of yall jabbers yo ugly spite.”

  “Mr Curriden has had an off day too,” Jumbo said.

  “These biscuits could drop an ox,” Curriden said. “From the inside or out, eaten or thrown.”

  “From here on out, Mister Reese,” Kizzy said, pointing a witchy finger at him, “pray God I don’t pyson yo tea.”

  I scrambled back upstairs to find my place in Jumbo’s log, and the argument in the kitchen-the feud-got louder. Soon, though, I was hip-deep in Jumbo’s autobiography, and the noisy dipsy-do downstairs might as well’ve originated in Zanzibar. I no longer heard it.

  31

  My Second Life (Continued)

  Initially without aim or plan, I wandered the coldest and least-known wildernesses of Siberia, from its northernmost bays to the sparse taiga forests of the Kolyma Mountains, and many other remote locales besides. Why did I live?

  At length I found reasons: to atone for the murders I had committed as Frankenstein’s outcast get; to discover a suitable resting place for my late progenitor; to enter human society as a worthy and productive citizen.

  Vain hopes!

  The cold agreed with me, as I have said, and I had little trouble sustaining myself even on thin soups of such despised vegetable matter as lichens, bark, evergreen needles, moss, and the tubercules and roots of many an unprepossessing shrub. As one item in my continuing penance, I had resolved never to eat flesh again, and had perfectly heeded this self-commandment. Other opportunities for atonement seldom arose, however, and I began to sink into a lonely despondency inimical to my most basic goals.

  The body of my creator ever posed a difficulty, acting as an impediment to my travels, aimless though they were. By now, it had suffered much from exposure to the elements and from fluctuations of temperature. Frankenstein’s once handsome face, albeit pallid from inward struggle and his final illness, now resembled that of a tortoise. His nose suggested a beak, his mouth a V-shaped scar, his throat a desiccated wattle. During a brief period of inattention, I had allowed a magpie to pluck out one of his frozen eyeballs; the other had oozed away over days of blinding-nor do I use the word in jest-sunshine.

  Owing to the ambient cold (unremitting but for these bright interludes), the decay process in him advanced by staggers. Although his body never emitted an insupportable odour, only on the iciest days was it altogether free of a sickly perfume. At such times, his limbs had the hardness of gun barrels; at the Siberian summer’s height, however, they flopped like a rag doll’s and by such movements wafted their attenuated stench.

  “Oh, Frankenstein!” I once apostrophised him. “Is this how I honour you? Is this how I justify myself in your sightless gaze?”

  As both thinking creature and nomad, I lacked direction. The place most likely to accept and hallow my progenitor’s bones, the city of Geneva, stood leagues and leagues away. I had no idea how many. It might as well have nestled in a lunar vale, for how, without divine aid, could I reach either Switzerland or the moon?

  Often I thought to slip my burden and to pay homage to my maker by setting out his remains on some wind-blown promontory, where eagles or wolves could reverence his spirit through the machinery of their appetites. Frankenstein had loved the Alps, their glacial majesty and their vistas of desolate loveliness. In my creator’s belated obsequies, could not the icescapes and mountains of eastern Siberia serve as either emblems or proxies of the Alps? Although I hoped so, the strictness of my call to atonement argued the reverse.

  At length, however, I discovered for him on an inlet of the Chukchi Sea a temporary resting place, a grotto of stone which I further concealed with driftwood and glacial rubbish, where I could safely cache his body during my rambles afield. By this expedient, I preserved not only that which persisted of his corpse, but also my freedom as a moral agent.

  Why, my hypothetical reader may inquire, did I remain in the Siberian wilderness without soliciting the companionship of men? In one regard, the question is foolish, for my treatment by the human species, from Victor Frankenstein himself to the Chukchi bowmen of a more recent encounter, had little inclined me to trust it. In another regard, however, the question demands an answer, for I had fixed as one of my goals my own domestication and socialisation. The process could not fulfill itself if, confining my rambles to remote wastelands, I shunned even the most glancing impingement on members of my creator’s race.

  Nothing had occurred, I understood, to render my physique or my hideous facial features less alarming to human beings. Indeed, these attributes had turned even Frankenstein against me. His genius had succumbed to his weakness of soul; he had repudiated me almost in the instant of my first emergence into consciousness. I still had a powerful recollection of that moment: the chemical-stained hands of my maker and the flicker of ineffable disgust in his eyes. Unhappily, my deformed countenance, still provoking fear, would prevent others from compassionating me. Even had my face shone as comely as Apollo’s, my great size would always speak to the timid or the wary my undeniable potential for inflicting ruin. The universal policy of men towards me, then, bad founded itself on either flight or preemptive recourse to a garbled Golden Rule, namely, Do unto Frankenstein’s creature what it unquestionably purposes for thee.

  Therefore, I practised and took pride in caution. I inwardly celebrated my ability, honed in Switzerland and the Orkneys, to come within a whisper of my human prey without alerting it, or others, to my menacing proximity. Now, however, I intended no threat. I told myself that my stealthiness facilitated observation when, in fact, it had become habitual, a means whereby I evaded natural human commerce and further inured myself to solitude. Intellectual diversion-be it reading, games, debate, or philosophical contemplations-had completely fled my world; day by day, I devolved toward the instinctive mindlessness of the timber wolf or the snow owl.

  A fortuitous encounter, involving no human beings at all, put a halt to this bestial slide. As aimlessly I worked my way along the icy palisades on the Bering Strait, I heard the clamorous voices of mating walruses. This passionate baying, at once like the barking of dogs and the squealing of swine, echoed from the clif
f side rocks, I sought its source. Before long, I had clambered to a throne of barnacled granite downwind from the sea beasts’ rookery.

  From this perch, I had a hidden view of the harem and of the sultanic male treading a young female, lie bellowed his triumphant ecstasy. His lovemaking impressed me with both its ardour and its violence, for it hardly seemed that the pinned sultana could derive any pleasure from her paramour’s coercive affections. On the other hand, she may have relished her role as his and the other females’ cynosure; thus, she periodically barked her doubtful rapture. The females unoccupied with either procreation or the establishment of a pecking hierarchy tended their wet-eyed pups.

  All this I absorbed with the greatest curiosity, irritation, and excitement. Shamefacedly, I confess that I considered attempting to cuckold the bull with one of his concubines. The feat struck me as possible but riskful: I might incur a tusk wound. If his massiveness were any trustworthy measure, however, the king walrus must weigh five times as much as I. Thus, he had not my nimbleness or speed, and the rookery was large. An ingenious rogue might well swyve a lady or two at sufficient distance from him to escape either interruption or injury.

  I seriously entertained this notion, unnatural as my maker or his murdered bride would have adjudged it, because the yearning in my loins had produced a persistent tumidity; I ached with bittersweet excruciations impossible to describe. At last (appalled by the image of myself in coitus with a bewhiskered, legless, fish-eating sloth), I foreswore the temptation and spilled my lavalike seed on a rock.